I’ve been using the Android Notifier with my MacBook for some time. If you haven’t checked it out, please do. The application sends notifications to your desktop for everything from incoming texts to a low battery warning to third party notifications. It’s a great little app if you’re into that sort of thing. So when I made my switch to Ubuntu, naturally I wanted to get the Android Notifier working with my new machine.

I won’t get into how the application works or how to pair your phone with Ubuntu. There’s plenty of info on those out there. The issue that I was running into, was with my Nexus S paired and being able to send files to and from Ubuntu, I could not get Android Notifier to pick up on any of my test notifications. When setting up Bluetooth on my computer to allow for file transfers I’d discovered that Android uses OBEX to push and receive file transfers over Bluetooth. So, with this in mind, I decided to investigate how Android Notifier listens for notifications. After checking out the wiki on the project page for Notifier, I found this article regarding the protocols used by Android Notifier (thank you to the Notifier team for posting the documentation on this). Turns out for the Bluetooth connection, Notifier uses a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) when sending notifications.

QUICK ANSWER:
While this may vary between distributions of Linux, on my Ubuntu 10.10 setup, I had to install the UUID command-line tool in order to get Android Notifier working. To do this, run the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install uuid

I hope this helps someone solve their issue using Android Notifier. I’d hate for someone to miss out such a sweet app.